A Bunny Was Decapitated in an Ongoing Blood Feud Between Figure Skaters

The bad blood between the newer Landskrona Figure Skating and Sport Club (LKSK), and the more competitive GF Sport Figure-Skating has been simmering ever since the LKSK was founded in August. We're talking about a lot more than competitors sniping at each other. According to a story in The Local, an English-language Swedish news site, the feud just got real. Burglaries are happening, death threats are being sent to children, and last Wednesday a pet bunny was ripped to shreds in a late night raid on an organizer's house.

Unlike the bunny in the header image, which is only sleeping, the pet rabbit was decapitated, disemboweled, and had all its paws severed and laid out in a gruesome, Manson Family-style tableau. The scene left a woman using the alias, "Christine," the pet's owner and figure skating club organizer, terrorized after she went to feed Mr. Floppy (the name I'm giving to the unidentified rabbit) the morning after the crime.

“I see the remains of my rabbit’s body… it’s in my mind all the time,” Christine said to the Local. “It’s cruel and it’s cowardly, but it’s too late.” Police said the bunny killer was a whiz with a knife, judging from the cuts, and was probably a hunter or butcher. They're being forced to speculate, because there's an open investigation going on, and few good clues are forthcoming.

There is one tiny lead: Christine's husband reported seeing a burglar, perhaps the same one, the previous night, fleeing their garage on a bike. The person of interest wore a hat and a jacket with the letter T on the back.

Christine had a hand in organizing LKSK, specifically as an antidote to GF's monopoly on figure skating education. Over the past few months, however, what could have been a spirited competition between two organizations with differing principles quickly turned bitter. For instance, LKSK provided loaner equipment to youngsters, contravening a longstanding GF policy. GF responded by allegedly stealing the loaner equipment from Christine's car. She's certain GF-ers were the culprits because they disregarded her laptop during their burglary.

But that doesn't make GF the bad guys. It was supposedly LKSK thugs who upped the ante next by sending a letter to the GF's treasurer Pauline Kronvall in which they ordered her to leave the GF board, or her children would be murdered.

Between the initial threatening letter and the bunny decapitation, there were more incidents. A fourteen-year-old figure skater was threatened by another. Kronvall received two more threatening letters. There were fruitless police investigations. Both sides became paranoid, with Kronvall saying "I started looking over my shoulder when walking alone in the ice hall," and Christine withholding her identity from the press and saying "I cannot live my life being afraid. You can’t watch your kids or your house all the time, and you can’t just lock the doors and stay inside all your life."

Figure skating is notorious for fomenting personal rivalries, some of which have spawned aggravated assault, a crime with a higher rate of incidence in Sweden than in other developed countries. This tense rivalry might plausibly lead to something truly tragic. Sweden may be a socialist fantasyland full of beautiful people, but it's also the world's leader in thinking up new kinds of horrifying violence.